#11: On the Relationship Between Thinking and Being
April 2, 2024
Cambridge
Victor Wooten–More Love
I’ve made it to ten of these! Thank you all for keeping up with this little project. I’ve reached double digits and stayed true to my goal of writing each week. Now I’m going to adjust the rules slightly and shoot for a biweekly schedule in order to give myself more time to think, edit, and hopefully create a better final product.
Three disparate encounters put me in mind of the topic of today’s note.
First, recently, a man was released from prison after almost forty years. I got to know him last summer when I worked on his case as an intern at the D.C. public defender’s office, and we kept in touch after I left. He won a motion under a new D.C. law and was released over a decade earlier than he otherwise would have been. He had been in prison since before I was born, and for much of that time, he had no hope of ever being released. Yet for his own sake he embarked on a journey of radical personal change, confronting his past and getting in touch with a kind and openminded way of being. The empathy and understanding that radiate from him are special—the kind of qualities that too few of us have. I’m so happy that he’s able to live freely again and share those gifts with other people outside of prison walls.
Second, deep in a Wikipedia rabbit hole that started with pupusas de loroco, I found myself learning about several Catholic people who were murdered in the Salvadoran Civil War. Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated by a sniper while holding Mass after he called on soldiers to disobey any order to kill civilians. Soon after, four American missionaries, three of them nuns, were sexually assaulted and murdered by the state police. They had refused to abandon the country amid growing violence. One had written to a friend: “The danger is extreme and [the Peace Corps] were right to leave. … I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. … I almost could [leave], except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. … Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sear of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.” (The Reagan administration, supporting the right-wing Salvadoran government with billions of dollars of aid, tried to discredit and minimize these stories of heroism and sacrifice.)
Third, I read a note by Professor Pam Karlan remembering her (conservative, deeply religious) colleague, Bill Stuntz. His “classic” 2001 article The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law set the stage for the legal academy to reconsider its approach to policing, blame, and incarceration. Karlan writes that he was distinguished by “a passion for justice, a profound impact on the law, a deep religious faith accompanied (probably not coincidentally) by an almost disquieting humility, and a rare gift for friendship and celebrating others’ good fortune.” I’ve been reflecting on her words ever since I read them, especially "a rare gift for friendship and celebrating others' good fortune." They describe exactly the kind of person who I shyly want to be.
All of these people show us a particular way of being: soft, open, kind, brave, trusting, true. They make me realize how much time I spend imagining and arguing for the kind of world I want to live in—and how little time I spend really living that way. Swimming in the river of life is hard. Much easier to sit on the banks, toss in ideas like sticks, and watch them float speculatively away. But how we act is who we are. Add it all up, and you get the world we live in. Our actions, not our ideas, can create justice and the good life. And being is a completely different can of worms from thinking.
When I think about this, I picture the transmission of a car. The engine spins separately from the wheels. If you put it in neutral and step on the gas, the engine revs higher and higher but the wheels don’t turn. You need the clutch to connect the turning engine to the still axle. Thinking is like revving the engine: the exciting combustion of fuel that you need to turn the wheels. But without an efficient way to channel all that energy, all you’re making is noise. Making change—turning the wheels—requires something more. Not more gas, not a bigger engine. It requires a piece that can move between worlds, between the spin of the motor and the stasis of the wheels, something that can find purchase in the stillness and get it going. It requires (by now I’m sure I’ve pushed the metaphor beyond its breaking point) listening to the quiet of the wheel, which will have to start slowly if it is to start at all.
Living well requires more than good ideas—and I think a lot of what it requires is a little “woo-woo,” as they say. Stuff that has to be extended both to oneself and to others: love, forgiveness, patience, rest, curiosity, for example. Stuff that comes from a sense of wonder at the impossibility and beauty of our lives, and from an appreciation that all of it is fleeting and irretrievable, and from a willingness to do something weird and special with it all. Two excerpts from poems get at what I’m thinking of.
… Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth. …
—W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
Last night I watched my brothers play,
The gentle and the reckless one,
In a field two yards away.
For half a century they were gone
Beyond the other side of care
To be among the peaceful dead.
…
I thought, How could I be so dull,
Twenty thousand days ago,
Not to see they were beautiful?
I asked them, Were you really so
As you are now, that other day?
And the dream was soon away.
…
I have observed in foolish awe
The dateless mid-days of the law
And seen indifferent justice done
By everyone on everyone.
And in a vision I have seen
My brothers playing on the green.
—Edwin Muir, “The Brothers”
Until next time.